Month: September 2016

The critics reiterate the statement that it is not said In the Pentateuch that Moses wrote any of it except the curse on Amalek, the Ten Commandments and certain other portions, as if this were an unanswerable argument against the Mosaic authorship of the Law. Is one to allege, then, that Hammurabi cannot be called the author of the code named after him, unless, forsooth, he inscribed it with his own hand? And yet the monument expressly ascribes itself to Hammurabi in the words of the epilogue (Col. xh. 59-67). “In the days that are yet to come, for all future times, may the king who is in the land observe the words of righteousness which I have written upon my monument.” Or, is Sennacherib not to be called the author of Cylinder No. 103.000, unless he himself inscribed it? Yet it begins with his name and titles and is full of his words and deeds recorded in the first person, singular number. “I fashioned a memorial tablet,” “I set it up,” “I flayed Kirua,” “I sent my troops.” It is all I, I, I, my, my, my, from beginning to end; and yet, it is certain that he never wrote a word of it with his own hand. Or, is Darius Hystaspis not the author of the Behistun Inscription, whose sentences are largely in the third person and of which nearly every section begins with “Thus saith Darius the king”? What a subject for the painter’s brush! Darius, the Persian Achaemenid, king of Babylon and of the lands, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, sitting on a scaffolding, his chisel in his left hand and his mallet in his right, cutting into the imperishable rock the record of his achievements by the grace of Ahuramazda! And how about Thothmes I and III, and Rameses II, III and XIII, and Shishak, and Tiglath-Pileser I and III, and Nebuchadnezzar I and II, and others, whose numerous and lengthy records have been preserved? Are we to suppose that Moses cannot have recorded his thoughts and words and deeds just in the same way that his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, did?

Robert Dick Wilson, A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament, pp. 24, 25.